Putting women and gender in the frame -- A consideration of gender in the Global Report on Human Settlement Planning Sustainable Cities 2009

Abstract

Gender mainstreaming has been an important part of gender architecture since the decade for women 1976-1985. During the latter part of this decade, the Global Reports on Human Settlement were also launched by UN-Habitat, the UN Programme for Human Settlements and the urban mandate. Given the growing understanding of the way in which planning impacts on gender equality and women’s empowerment, the flagship nature of these reports makes them important both symbolically and practically. The paper discusses the development of the global reports and gender mainstreaming and examines the way in which the report on Planning for Sustainable Urbanisation (UN-Habitat, 2009) tackled the issue of gender equality. It assesses the process of producing the reports and provides an assessment of the output against the framework of Moser and Moser (2005) framework.